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Qaddafi’s Faustian Bargain

By Robert F. Worth October 21, 2011 2:32 pmOctober 21, 2011 2:32 pm

Editor’s Note: Since the start of the Libyan revolution, Robert F. Worth has written two stories for the magazine. The first, “On Libya’s Revolutionary Road,” was published in April; the second, “The Surreal Ruins of Qaddafi’s Never-Never Land,” appeared in our Sept. 25 issue. Since the news broke of Qaddafi’s death, Worth has been reporting for the paper, but took time out to put together these thoughts below:

In the video, you can hear the disbelief and giddy joy in the voices of the fighters as they surround Qaddafi, who looks like a bloody rag doll but is still visibly alive. Some of them are shouting “God is great,” but mostly the sound registers as a roar, a wordless expression of triumph. This tyrant who had stood over them all their lives like a cruel, mercurial phantom, was now in their hands, an old man sprawled on the hood of a car. By the time the video hit the Internet and YouTube on Thursday, Qaddafi was dead.

In a sense, Qaddafi foresaw his own death long before any of his subjects could imagine it. He told the leaders of the Arab world during a 2008 summit that America would hang them all just as it hung Saddam Hussein. It was his own people who struck him down in the end, but Qaddafi hadn’t been entirely wrong; if not for American firepower he would almost certainly be alive today. Perhaps he understood, dimly, how hated he was in his own country. Certainly you would never guess it from his speeches, those impossibly bizarre rants in which he swore, even in his final days in hiding, that all of Libya loved him.

That is what made the Libyan revolt such a riveting spectacle: unlike the other embattled Arab Spring dictators, Qaddafi showed no doubt, no instinct for compromise and self-preservation. He never really tried to stave off the end with half-hearted “reforms.” He seemed to know he was plunging himself and Libya down a tragic path, and, like Macbeth, to embrace it. Perhaps he understood that he had gone “so far in blood” that there was no turning back. In retrospect, his whole 42-year reign seemed to follow an inexorable arc toward ruin. From the handsome young revolutionary who inspired such hope in his people he transformed into the drugged, puffy-faced madman howling for slaughter in the streets of his own cities. Many Libyans told me they believed Qaddafi used black magic to keep himself in power for so long. I was almost tempted to believe it. I found Chadian witchcraft amulets in some of the weapons depots abandoned by his loyalists. Before his death, he behaved like someone who had sold his soul to the devil, and, like Faust, was waiting to be dragged down to Hell.
His people certainly saw his trajectory as a tragedy. Both in eastern Libya, where the revolt began, and in Tripoli in the final days, I was amazed by the passion I heard in people’s voices. It went beyond the abstract anger one usually feels for a public figure one has never met. Qaddafi had tried to make himself identical to Libya, to ingrain himself into the lives of all his subjects, and they paid him back with a deeply personal hatred, as if he were their own abusive father.

“I will not rest until Qaddafi is dead,” I was told by one rebel from Misurata, who had refused medical treatment for shrapnel lodged in his chest because he wanted to keep fighting. I remember being in down town Tripoli in late August, just after the city fell to the rebels, and seeing a huge poster of Qaddafi that someone had pointedly jammed into an overflowing garbage bin. “I am here,” someone had scrawled in Arabic on the poster – a derisive reference to one of Qaddafi’s own speeches, in which he had mocked Western claims that he was hiding from NATO. As I gazed at the poster, a man walked up with a load of his own garbage, and dumped it onto Qaddafi’s face, staring fiercely at the image as he did so.

Bruce Grierson wrote this week’s cover story about Ellen Langer, a Harvard psychologist who has conducted experiments that involve manipulating environments to turn back subjects’ perceptions of their own age.Read more…